As we near the end of a summer season stuffed to bursting with big, ambitious comic-book movies -- from the buffed, Wagnerian pecs of Thor to the pompous clutter of Green Lantern -- here comes Captain America: The First Avenger, limping behind the rest of the parade. The picture is almost admirably boring, as if director Joe Johnston (The Wolfman, The Rocketeer), had wanted to distinguish his movie by not packing it with action, or even bothering much to define the characters. It's a lopsided experiment that might have worked -- the movie takes so long to get going, you're fooled into thinking it might be going somewhere -- but Captain America just doesn't have the stuff. Like its lead character, it's 4F for sure and desperately hoping to hide it.
Chris Evans is scrawny, underfed Steve Rogers, a kid who's desperate to join the fight to kick Hitler's ass but who, with his narrow, rickety shoulders and asthmatic demeanor, is deemed unfit for service. After he tries to enlist for zillionth time, a mysterious scientist with an even more mysterious German accent, Dr. Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci), takes note of his zeal to serve his country. "So!" Erskine addresses his young protégé, "You vant to go overseese und kill some Natzeets!" Ignoring the blustery, jowl-wagging protestations of Colonel Chester Phillips (Tommy Lee Jones), Dr. Erskine has big plans for Steve. No longer will he be the little guy who gets sand kicked in his face in the Charles Atlas ads. He's going to be one of the Army's first supersoldiers.
As it turns out, he's also the last: Just as Dr. Erskine finishes the serum-injecting procedure that turns little Steve into big Steve, a vandal bursts into the laboratory and steals the vial of all-important stuff. It turns out there's a force afoot more deadly than Hitler and his minions, and Nazi turncoat Johann Schmidt (Hugo Weaving) wants to use it to rule the world, or to do whatever it is those guys always want to do. Schmidt has formidable superpowers himself, after an early encounter with a glowing something-or-other, and even though he looks suspiciously like Hugo Weaving for the first two-thirds of the movie, later on he peels off his rubber face to reveal that he's really Red Skull, a villain with the nose of Michael Jackson, the cheekbones of Claudette Colbert, and the complexion of Hot Stuff.
Now that Steve has that Adonis bod, he can finally become Captain America. Well, not so fast. First he has to pay his dues by donning a not particularly dashing homemade Captain America costume -- complete with star-painted circular shield -- and trekking across the country, with a bevy of chorus girls in tow, as a walking advertisement for the armed forces. But when he learns that his best pal from home, enlisted man James Buchanan "Bucky" Barnes, is in danger, he throws a dashingly weathered leather jacket over his silly costume, jumps on a motorcycle that he finds somewhere-or-other, and begins outrunning explosions and otherwise battling every airplane, motor vehicle and ruthless footsoldier Red Skull can put in his path.
In between he furtively courts the affections of his dishy Army superior Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell). Occasionally, the movie's token black man appears -- it turns out he's played by the marvelous actor Derek Luke, and even though he has only two or three lines in the movie, you keep waiting for him to show up with more. He doesn't. And that's the thing about Captain America: Even through the snooziest bits, Johnston keeps you hanging on, hoping for more. The script was written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, based on the comic books by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. (Marvel eminence Stan Lee makes his customary cameo in the movie.) It was shot, by Shelly Johnson, in suitably muted, sepia-tinged colors -- the movie's look nods to the idea that even if superhero blockbusters are a relatively modern phenomenon, these characters have been around longer than some of our parents have. (Captain America made his first appearance in 1941.)
But Johnston can't quite hold it all together, even though he has some bold, wonderful ideas. For one scene, he recreates a fantasy amalgam of the 1939 and 1964 World's Fairs, borrowing the World of Tomorrow from the first and the Unisphere from the second. (Rick Heinrichs' grand, deco-modern production design is just right here.) And if the first two-thirds of the movie are a little slow-going, at least Johnston seems to be holding bombast at bay. The idea, I think, was to make an extravagant comic-book movie that didn't wear its price tag on its sleeve.
But in the end, the action sequences are just overblown and dollar-squandering, with no particular payoff in the entertainment department. The supporting actors -- particularly Jones, Tucci and Luke -- are the thing to watch here; they do all they can to keep the movie's gears running smoothly.
And Evans himself seems to be the right guy in the wrong movie. His unreal physique isn't, for me, at least, the big selling point here: After seeing him as the wimpy-shouldered Steve Rogers (the effect comes courtesy of CGI), I wished Evans actually looked that way. Walking around in his un-CGI'ed Captain America body, he looks like a sweetie pie dressed up as a side of beef -- it's cute, but also just a little wrong. Evans is better when he can just throw away his charm, as he did in the Fantastic Four movies as Johnny Storm, instead of cranking it up to sustain a whole movie. I liked him best in the movie's most casual, un-superhero-like sequence, one in which he's on tour with those chorus girls, taking the stage in city after city, doing Uncle Sam's work. At that point he's still wearing the two-bit Captain America suit -- the wings on his helmet hang limply, like kitten ears. There's something incongruous about packing a guy who's built like Evans into a suit like that. If only Captain America had more dashes of that style, more low-key winks as opposed to blinding flashbulbs. But then, it probably wouldn't have cost as much to make. And in the superhero realm, at least, that's now the major measure of what a film is worth.